Social justice

It should be fairly clear that the notion of "social justice" which follows from what I have said is not all that simple to come by. Soaking the rich to do good to the poor is unjust socially, even if the poor might be benefitted a great deal and the rich might barely miss what you take from them. If the rich have a right to the money, you are using a morally wrong means for what you consider a "good" purpose, and you are letting your notion of what is "good" override the objective considerations of right and wrong.

But society is a cooperative interrelation of human beings, and cooperation demands of its nature activity which is not beneficial to the one acting; and therefore, it might be possible to do at least some soaking of the rich and not be inconsistent with yourself (i.e. be immoral).

First, let me discuss whether this cooperative relationship is necessary for human beings to be human. If we are simply independent, self-determining individuals, who can freely decide to get into such an inter-dependent relation, but need not of our nature, then to force people to cooperate when they don't want to get into a cooperative relation (e.g. to force unwilling citizens to belong to civil society and then force them to pay taxes) would be a violation of human self-determination and morally wrong.

But in point of fact, no one of us can survive unless we receive uncompensated service from others. First of all, children cannot compensate their parents for what the parents do; and children will starve unless their parents (or someone in their place) feeds, clothes, educates, and shelters them. Hence, the economic relationship of "independent" individuals who cooperate by mutual quid-pro-quo compensation is only part of what it takes to be human; if we don't have the cooperative, interdependent relationship also, we can't live as human beings. Further, as I mentioned, since not everyone recognizes or respects all rights of all others, then unless people cooperate to ensure the respect of all rights of all people, the "independent, self-determining" self cannot in practice determine himself without interference which he cannot in practice defend himself against.

Therefore, we cannot be human unless we relate to others in both the interdependent, cooperative way (expecting behavior under threat of harm) and the "independent" self-determining way (respecting rights and compensating activities). Neither of these types of relationship can be reduced to the other; though historically, there have been attempts to "derive" one from the other.

Since the family in olden times was regarded as the most "natural" way to relate to others, and since you are "thrown," as Heidegger would say, into the family, where you must cooperate or else, then it is not surprising to find that in times past (and even in most of the world in time present), the cooperative relationship is looked on as the "really natural" one, and rights, if they are recognized at all, are conceived of as coming from and through the society--which culminated in the Divine Right of Kings and Thomas Hobbes's theory that the king granted and could take away all rights.

And this led to Locke, who saw (correctly) that we "own" ourselves, as it were, and were not possessions of the King; that we had inalienable rights that were not given by any society and could not be taken away by any society, but simply must be recognized by every society. We, who live in a society which exists precisely on this principle, find it the "more natural" relationship to consider ourselves as self-determining, and to conceive of society as simply a kind of agreement we make together to assure each other that others will respect our rights and we will respect others'--and to make economic transactions possible.

But both of these are wrong. The economic relationship is not derived from the social relationship; nor is the social relationship derived from the economic: we are both self-determining and interdependent; and the one aspect of ourselves gives us rights and economic transactions, and the other the relation of cooperation, laws, and threats of punishment.

Let me now define civil society as the society whose common goal is the common good. That is, it is the society whose sole purpose it is to see to it that no one's rights are violated. We must, as I said, cooperate to see to it that this is done; and the society which does this is civil society--and its authority, its apparatus for deciding what actions must be done by members to ensure this purpose, what punishments are necessary to motivate the appropriate actions, and what is to be done to see to it that violators receive the punishment (the legislative, executive, and judicial functions), is called government. Government passes laws, sees to it they are carried out, and imposes sanctions when they are not.

It follows that government can force (by threats) people to do things when others' rights would be violated if the actions in question weren't done--and this forcing does not take away any right of the ones forced; the reason being that you never have a right to do anything which violates anyone else's right, and if you didn't do the act society is forcing on you, you would wittingly or not be violating somebody's right. Hence, it is not unjust to take away your freedom in this case, and force you to do something--even if you didn't ask to get into civil society.

Why this last? Because without civil society, you couldn't exist as human; your rights would be being violated, because there would be no cooperation to ensure that people wouldn't be stealing from you, no defining of money so that you could engage in economic transactions, and so on and so on. No one is "self-made." So you have the benefits of society, if you are "self-made"; and so even if you didn't ask to be in it, you still have to cooperate in seeing that no one's rights are violated.

Therefore, we have to state two concepts of justice: (1) commutative justice, which is the justice of compensation, where you give up something to me if you expect me to do something for you, where we live up to contracts and agreements, and so on. This is "justice" in the sense of the consistency of the relationship between self-determining individuals, wherein rights are respected and compensation is agreed on for services rendered. It is not exactly between "equals," because rights are based on personhood, not equality.

But (2) there is also distributive justice in which those who are capable (with the least inconvenience) of seeing to it that no one's rights are violated are expected to do actions which are not compensated, but which protect the rights of others. In distributive justice more is expected from those who receive least from the society, and more is given to those who do least for the society.

More is expected of those who receive least, because those who are most able to do most for others are the ones who have achieved their goals and have more than enough; and these people (a) need very little from civil society other than stability and protection, and (b) because they don't have to be struggling to achieve their goals, are hurt least by giving something of what they have or their time to others. They shouldn't have things given to them in compensation for their time, because this would be to take from others to compensate them, and others (by the supposition) less able to give it; their "compensation" is the fact that they live in a just society. More is given to those who do least, precisely because those who need help are those whose rights are being violated, which means that they are living at a less-than-human level; and therefore, they have no resources or time to give to others. For those of us to whom "justice" means "giving to each person what he has a right to have" and "equality" and "fairness," (i.e. those who know justice only as commutative justice) distributive justice sounds unjust. People are not, in distributive justice, being treated "fairly," in the sense of "equally," because some people are expected to do something with no compensation for their time and talent--whether they like it or not, and under threat of punishment if they don't do it--and others simply get things handed to them without doing anything to earn them. That's "charity," not justice, isn't it?

Remember, I said that any society was based on love; and so there is a kind of charitable element here. But this is true justice. Justice is the virtue by which people act consistently with the people involved in the action.

In the case of the society whose precise function it is to see to it that no one's rights are violated--that no one is positively harmed in his humanity--then if everyone ignores, say, a child who has no parents, the child will starve to death. This ignoring amounts to a conspiracy of inaction (in practice, whether the conspiracy is intentional or not) which deprives the child of what he needs to live; and so it is, in effect, a conspiracy to kill the child. This must be prevented; and therefore, the people as a whole have to see to it that the child is fed. This means in practice that someone has to be delegated to do this. But there may be no one who has any relation to this child. Who will be delegated? Obviously, the one who can with the least inconvenience feed and care for the child.

The child then receives what he has a right to receive, and the person who is delegated is not being treated unjustly, because any society involves cooperative activity, and it is simply asking this particular cooperative activity of this person here and now. It isn't "fair" or "equal," but the child is not the equal of the adult; but this "equality" has nothing to do with whether the child has rights against other human beings.

But, as I said, in making these demands, distributive justice is violated if (a) the action demanded does more than simply prevent a violation of rights (more is done than has to be), or (b) the action demanded violates some right of the person who is required to do it.

Hence, social justice involves at least three things: (1) an objective assessment of whose rights are being violated (or menaced), (2) discovery of what actions are in practice possible to correct the violation, and (3) an evaluation of who is capable of performing those actions with the least inconvenience and with no violation of any other right of anyone.

One thing social justice is emphatically not; it is not "compassionate." The "compassionate" person who "empathizes" with the plight of the poor and who has no sympathy with the "fat cats" who have more than enough to be happy is the person who will (a) do more than needs doing for the poor, which creates economic incentives to be poor and have things done for you--which violates the self-determination of the poor, and therefore is unjust to them; and (b) will take from the rich more than is necessary and impose unnecessary restrictions on them, violating their rights (which he has no sympathy for), and will motivate them to take themselves and their riches elsewhere, or use their riches in silly tax shelters instead of productively, which is what will really help the poor. Yes, "trickle down" is the best way to help the poor, as has been demonstrated historically for at least a hundred years.

A major part of the problem here is the false notion that rights are based on "equality," and when people are unequal, the ones in the inferior position have their rights violated. But we are not equal; we have different abilities, intelligence, and physical strength given us by God; it is impossible for human beings to be all equal, because then there would only be one human being. And our different endowments give us by nature different and unequal opportunities; one very gifted person has by nature a better chance of getting ahead than an ugly, stupid, weak person. There is no violation of any right here, as the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard shows; if you are given what fits your nature, how are you harmed if someone else is given more--unless your natures are "equal" somehow? But they aren't; there is no empirical and no theoretical evidence to support this secular dogma; all the evidence points in the other direction.

Rights are based on the fact that we are self-determining, and in the act of self-determination can interfere with others' self-determination, whether they are our "equals" or not. So if I, in developing myself, have to maim a child (who is not my "equal,") then I have acted inconsistently with myself as self-determining (since I want no person, bigger, stronger, more talented, even an angel, to interfere with me).

The point is that unequal treatment is not a violation of rights; and the second point is that distributive justice is necessarily unequal treatment, from which follows the third point, that equal treatment, systematically applied, is a violation of distributive (and therefore social) justice.

Let me give one example. One of the current arguments against the death penalty is that it is "discriminatory": more Blacks and lower-class citizens are executed than Whites or middle class people for comparable crimes. Here, we are in a division of social justice called retributive justice, which suits the punishment to the nature of the one punished.

Retributive justice demands that no more be done in punishing an offense than is the minimum required to make it not advantageous to commit the offense. That is, the threat of punishment is supposed to motivate obedience to the law. If the punishment threatened is so light as to make it more to your advantage to violate the law and pay the penalty, it does not do its job--as, for instance, fining a prostitute $20.00 for engaging in prostitution, when she charges $50.00 for the act; even if she gets caught, she makes $30.00 for what she did.

But if the punishment is more than merely what is necessary to motivate behavior, then gratuitous harm is done to the violator when the punishment is being carried out, and so the government cannot say, "All we were trying to do was to see to it that the law stays in force." That is, not to punish violators is in effect to say to everyone, "We don't care if you violate this law; nothing is going to be done," which removes the sanction as a threat, and the law as a law vanishes. To keep the law in force, violators must be punished; but their harm cannot be willed; the purpose of the punishment must be solely that this has to be done in order not to encourage violations.

I have argued this elsewhere (See, for example, my Human Conduct), where I have also made out a case that the death penalty can be the minimum required to discourage certain acts like terrorism. I do not want to enter into a long exposition of that here. My point is that the judge in passing sentence must impose a penalty which is the minimum which in this case will ensure the "sanctity of the law," whether this is the same punishment as someone else gets or not.

For instance, for a middle-class White person, the disgrace and discomfort of mere imprisonment is enough to make it unreasonable for him to abandon his comfortable life by violating the law; whereas in the case of a ghetto Black, who already is living in conditions as bad as prison (where at least you get fed regularly), the "threat" of prison is not terribly significant. What has he got to lose? Hence, the threat that deters one class if citizens is insufficient to deter another class; and therefore they must not be given the same penalty, or retributive and therefore social justice is violated.

It may very well be that for the very downtrodden, the only sufficient deterrent for certain crimes would be the death penalty; anything else would make it reasonable for them to violate the law; and this must not be allowed to be the case, if the law is vital to society's survival, such as laws against murder. If the death penalty is then imposed in a "discriminatory" manner, then on this supposition this is the way things should be, and the opposite would violate social justice.

For those who say that the death penalty is "final and irrevocable," any penalty is "final and irrevocable" when it is carried out. You can't give back twenty years to a person you have locked into prison and then discovered that he was innocent; and is he less badly off than the person who was executed? He is only "objectively" so if death is the end of everything (but it isn't); life that fulfills our moral goals goes on after death; and so it may very well be that the imprisoned person's twenty years of horror is worse (from his point of view, which is the only valid one) than death. There are, for many people, many things that are worse than death.

A positively enormous amount of social injustice has been perpetrated in the name of a social "justice" that is based on emotional soft-headedness; and the ones hardest hit by this "compassion" are the very ones that were trying to be helped.

Hence, although there can be (and perhaps should be) a "preferential option for the poor," this must not be at the expense of the rights of the rich. If there is pity for the criminals on death row, this must not be at the expense of encouraging murderers to commit more crimes in the future.

The error I am arguing against (which is in many good people's minds; even many Bishops's minds, I am sad to say) comes, in the last analysis, from the assumption that there is an objective "good" and an objective "bad," and a confusion of "good and bad" and "right and wrong." It comes from yielding to the serpent's temptation and saying that God looks on things the way we do, and that if something seems "really bad" to us, then it is "really really really bad" to God--when in fact, nothing that happens is bad to God.

Social justice must not be a mask for imposing your own idea of "good" upon an unwilling world; because when you do that, you destroy what is in the name of "improvement," and the devils you drive away simply wander around the desert until they come back and see the house swept and ready for guests; and then they bring back the seven friends you introduced them to when you kicked them out.

So it is time, I think, to leave the realm of ethics and "the nature of things" and look at how the Christian attitude transforms the social relationship.